Matt Calabria is the director of the Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, also known as GROW NC. He previously served on the Wake County Board of Commissioners for nearly a decade.
Calabria spoke with Blue Ridge Public Radio's Felicia Sonmez recently about the mission of the new recovery office and its priorities as the region continues to rebuild after Hurricane Helene. Edited excerpts are below. For the full interview, click the “LISTEN” button above.
SONMEZ: Tell us a little bit about GROW NC. How did it come about? What's its mission? And what would you like to see it accomplish during your time as its director?
CALABRIA: GROW NC is designed to be the nerve center located within the governor's office so we've got a direct line of communication to him and to the agencies. And so, our job is to drive the recovery, accelerate it as best we can, coordinate efforts across agencies, so we're as effective and efficient as we can be, and then track our progress.
So our goal is to make sure that we have the speediest and most robust recovery that we can, given that there are a lot of challenges. And we know we're not going to get everything right, but we sure as heck will try.
The other thing I'll say is that we want this process to be effective, efficient, but also transparent. And so we're in the process of setting up a dashboard so that folks can see on a close-to-real-time basis how things are going, what our priorities are and so on.
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SONMEZ: Obviously, the need for help here in Western North Carolina is urgent, as you mentioned. Thousands of residents are still displaced from their homes and many local businesses are struggling to survive. What are some of the specific steps that GROW NC is taking in order to get assistance to those who need it as quickly as possible?
CALABRIA: So far, we've done a lot to extend, for example, small business recovery grants to small businesses. That's been very important. And the governor has put forward $20 million in state funding. We've had tens of millions of dollars in match from the private sector and from philanthropic organizations, and that's huge.
Businesses need money fast. We're also working to accelerate the debris-collection operation. We know that that is a very important, early-stage need in our community because of course, you can't rebuild if you've got a lot of debris in the way.
So, we're working to clean things up. We have added a number of pre-positioned state contractors to get out there and to collect debris. And we've also been working with the Army Corps of Engineers and other organizations within the federal government to expand the number of contractors they have. So we're seeing a significant uptick in the debris collection and removal.
We're also working to greatly expand what's called our disaster case management system, which is the unified, single front door for help for our residents. We have staffed it up tremendously, and we're seeing a huge throughput right now.
There are thousands of folks who are receiving FEMA aid for rental assistance, hotel cost payments, all sorts of things that help keep people in safe, warm places over the next several months.
SONMEZ: You mentioned FEMA just now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has certainly been in the news a lot this past couple of weeks. President Trump mentioned during a visit here last month that he might seek to overhaul or even eliminate the agency.
If FEMA is abolished — and we don't know yet whether that may happen — how might that affect the work that GROW NC is doing in our region?
CALABRIA: We know we're in a state of flux right now and there's a lot going on with respect to reformations of the federal government. There are a lot of folks speculating about what the future is going to look like.
People are right to be frustrated, and I think FEMA would be the first to admit that they haven't done everything perfectly. However, the main thing is that we don't take our foot off the gas in Western North Carolina's recovery. So the future could take a lot of forms, but what's very clear is the federal government plays a critical role.
We are trying to do the best that we can on the state level to fund the recovery effort, but the fact is that the federal funds are key. It's the largest portion — in terms of dollars — of the recovery. And so, we need their support.
SONMEZ: In recent years, there's been a lot of scrutiny on another statewide hurricane recovery agency, Rebuild NC. That agency was formed to help residents primarily in the eastern part of the state after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018.
Its director was ousted late last year amid allegations that the agency mismanaged millions of dollars and left some hurricane survivors living in limbo for years. What, if anything, is GROW NC doing differently to avoid a similar outcome here in the west?
CALABRIA: I think it's a fair question, and we have certainly kept the experience that we've seen out east in mind as we've built out our team here.
The very fact that GROW NC is in the governor's office and is communicating with the governor on a regular basis is a testament to the governor's interest in managing this on a daily basis. This is not something that's peripheral. It's front and center. And also, what we're doing is we're making sure we build that connective tissue with agencies, with legislators, so that everybody knows us and knows what's going on.
We are holding ourselves to very high standards when it comes to getting funding out, to rebuilding houses, making sure that people have temporary housing assistance and then ultimately permanent housing assistance. So we are building in financial management practices to ensure that we always know how much money we've got, how much money is going out the door, what's left. And we want to have as transparent and as thoughtful our recovery as we can. And we're working with anybody and everybody to do that.
